Dead Air

Don Hewitt and TV’s news-magazine menace.

To the frustrated channel surfer, it often seems that there is only one show on television, “Dateline NBC: 48 Hours of 20/20, PrimeTime Thursday,” and that this show endlessly repeats one basic story: The Thing That Went Horribly Wrong. In the codified news-magazine vernacular, what kind of thing went horribly wrong becomes instantly clear.

If it was a consumer product, you get something like the following: “Little did they know that a pepper grinder . . . could kill!”; an old photo of a young girl eating, her mother saying, “Mary always loved pepper”; a montage of an out-of-focus ambulance weaving through traffic, an I.V. drip, and a flatlining heart monitor; shoppers browsing for appliances as we pan down to the correspondent, who says, “Could it happen . . . in your kitchen?”; a shot of a document, then a snippet enlarged against it (“. . . failed to meet safety standards . . .”); an expert who is identified in voice-over as his hands tap at a keyboard, and who is then asked, “Just how dangerous are these condiment-delivery devices?” “Profoundly dangerous, Bob”; an empty playground swing rocking gently.

If it was boy-meets-girl that went bad, you get: “Tom was everyone’s favorite neighbor”; snapshots of a smiling young woman with her fiancé or cheerleading squad; “Mary had everything to live for”; “But he had a secret he couldn’t tell anyone”; “Little did she know her sunny world was about to go dark”; a shaky black-and-white reënactment of someone moving down a shadowy corridor, a door opening, the camera spinning as if slugged; closeup of a phone as we hear the 911 tape; Tom in a jumpsuit and manacles in court; the slow push in on Mary’s grave; the correspondent’s back-and-forth with the anchor in the studio, which goes, “We’d like to trust our neighbors, but sometimes trust can kill.” “Sobering words, Bob. Thanks!”

In a new memoir, “Tell Me a Story: Fifty Years and 60 Minutes in Television” (Public Affairs; $26), Don Hewitt acknowledges that news magazines themselves have gone horribly wrong, and essentially apologizes for having fathered the form when he created “60 Minutes,” in 1968. Hewitt is justifiably proud of “60 Minutes,” which he is still in charge of; it has won sixty-eight Emmys and is the longest continuously running prime-time program ever. But he deplores his followers’ shows as “promotable nonsense.” He once said, “We ruined television, because we made it profitable to do this kind of thing.” And it’s true that by earning so much money for CBS—some two billion dollars, all told—”60 Minutes” fundamentally changed television news. News was traditionally a loss leader, a public service that the networks provided to justify their huge profits from shows like “Gilligan’s Island.” Then, in the nineteen-eighties, the networks realized that “60 Minutes” was not only a Top Ten show but also cost much less to produce than an hour of entertainment. So they started spackling the holes in their schedules with “60 Minutes” knockoffs. As Hewitt writes, “Behind every television newsmagazine there’s a failed sitcom.”

How did news magazines become so tendentious, sapless, nervous, and null? Imitation remains the sincerest form of television, but those who copy “60 Minutes” always try to update it, to create even better TV. That’s where they go wrong. Strange as it sounds, the reason viewers love “60 Minutes” has little to do with its being a TV show.

Don Hewitt didn’t ruin television—get in line, buster—but with “Tell Me a Story” he isn’t doing publishing any favors. Walter Cronkite once remarked that Hewitt has a “pogo stick reaction” to the news, and readers of this jumpy, slapdash book may begin to wonder how “60 Minutes” ever stayed the course under his leadership. An early supporter of Ross Perot’s bizarro Presidential run, Hewitt once tried to enlist a group of stars, including Mike Wallace and Dan Rather, to buy CBS News and broadcast it from a satellite dish atop the Potamkin Cadillac dealership across the street.

Hewitt joined CBS in its infancy, in 1948, and was swept away by the bustle and glamour of the studio:

As a child of the movies, I was torn between wanting to be Julian Marsh, the Broadway producer in “42nd Street,” who was up to his ass in showgirls, and Hildy Johnson, the hellbent-for-leather reporter in “The Front Page,” who was up to his ass in news stories. Oh my God, I thought, in television, I could be both of them.

Hewitt quickly rose to become the producer-director of the “CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite,” but he seems to have spent most of those early years cowboying around: impersonating sheriffs, stealing NBC’s remote truck, and, for all we know, putting goldfish in Bill Paley’s pool. His prose bounds toward punch lines that must have convulsed many a bar buddy: “It’s these damned Limey bulbs!”; “ ‘Television?’ he said. ‘That’s a fad. It won’t last’ ”; “ ‘Gor, blimey,’ he said, ‘it’s never done that before.’ ” Gor, blimey? As a narrator, Hewitt does not inspire confidence (unless you take it as a sign of reliability that many of his stories also appear, word for word, in his 1985 book, “Minute by Minute . . .”). His explanation of why “60 Minutes” finally hired a female correspondent, Diane Sawyer, in 1984, is equal parts indignation and incoherence:

That she was great-looking everybody knew. That she was a great reporter we all surmised but weren’t sure of until she proved it on “60 Minutes.”One argument I didn’t accept was the one that said it was time to put a woman on “60 Minutes.” Baloney. It was time to put Diane Sawyer on “60 Minutes”—as far as I was concerned, she could have been named Tom Sawyer. Gender didn’t have a damn thing to do with it.

Right. And what are we to make of his remedies for American politics? “The First Amendment has never kept anyone from refusing to broadcast or print obscenities,” he writes, “and I contend that political commercials are often just that—obscenities—and should be banned for that reason alone.” Networks would recoup the lost revenue by airing liquor ads: “Let’s face it, Jack Daniels and Jim Beam, in my eyes, did a hell of a lot less harm to America than Dick Morris.” This sort of thing at least explains why Hewitt allows Andy Rooney to close “60 Minutes” with his own brand of flapdoodle.

Inside the control room, however, Don Hewitt is a wizard. He originated the chyron—the superimposed type that identifies the person onscreen—and popularized the two-camera interview, which allows us to see the correspondent’s interview behavior in real time. (When a news-magazine crew has only one camera, as is sometimes the case on foreign stories, the correspondent’s questions and thoughtful nods are taped afterward.)

Hewitt also has an instinctively populist feel. When he created “60 Minutes,” thirty-three years ago, he was in exile at CBS, laboring on “holier-than-thou documentaries that no one watched.” Eager to get back in the game, he pictured his new show as a television version of Life, which mixed photos of cuddly puppies and leggy starlets with war reporting. Similarly, Hewitt realized that “we could look into Marilyn Monroe’s closet so long as we looked into Robert Oppenheimer’s laboratory, too.”

The show’s format has remained remarkably simple: no theme music, no fancy camerawork or exploding logos. A correspondent in a gray armchair introduces his story against the backdrop of an electronically created magazine spread, and off we go: three stories a week, edited “to a manageable twelve to fifteen minutes to deal with the viewers’ attention span.” This was a new story length for television, a pleasing middle distance between the ninety-second sprints of nightly news and the deadly marathons of documentaries.

Hewitt insists that “60 Minutes” is a news program. And, frequently, it has been: in recent months, the show has turned out excellent stories on police brutality in New York City and tensions in the Gaza Strip. But Hewitt’s definition of news is not necessarily “advancing what is publicly known” or “finding the ultimate truth”; often it is simply “putting exciting people on camera.” In 1998, a “60 Minutes” producer persuaded Kathleen Willey to tell her story: that President Clinton had fondled her breasts in the Oval Office. When Clinton’s aides heard about it and wanted to respond, Hewitt told them that he would throw out the Willey interview if Clinton would come on camera for the whole hour. In other words, he’d let Clinton simply tell his side. (Clinton declined.) That’s not great journalism, but it would have been great ratings.

Hewitt’s regrettable legacy in this regard is that modern news magazines focus obsessively on “the get”—the first interview with a person of the moment, like Kato Kaelin or Monica Lewinsky. News is rarely got from the get. Everyone remembers Diane Sawyer—by then at ABC—doing headstands with Elián González and asking Marla Maples, in reference to Donald Trump, “Was it the best sex you ever had?” No one remembers Elián’s musings on world affairs or Maples’ evasive reply.

The get is about the correspondent’s charisma and power, not the subject’s views. Hewitt understood that the audience wanted the same thing that had drawn him to journalism in the first place: the movie version. In his case, this meant the boyhood sight of Joel McCrea playing a trenchcoat-wearing, pipe-puffing reporter in Hitchcock’s “Foreign Correspondent.” So he turned his correspondents into movie stars.

Other news magazines’ stories are mostly “B roll” images, or “wallpaper”—the shots that “cover” the correspondent’s narration (the pan across the empty courtroom; pill bottles clacking down a production line). “60 Minutes” stories are mostly “interview”—the correspondent and the subject(s), talking in extreme closeup. This love-scene technique increases intensity, and also coaxes us to grow fond of Ed Bradley’s earring and craggy teeth, Morley Safer’s seamed, Idaho-potato face, Lesley Stahl’s fluctuating hair (Chico Marx in the studio, Harpo Marx on the road), and Mike Wallace’s hussarlike bearing, his right arm braced on the chair wing as he listens to some miscreant, his left index finger cocked above his lip like a pistol. When we see Bradley naked in a Russian sauna in a story about Soviet nuclear weapons, or Tina Turner pulling Wallace onto her concert stage, the “story” is not being advanced, but our bond with the stars is. And that bond, in fact, is the story.

In casting Harry Reasoner and Mike Wallace as his original correspondents, Hewitt made news’s first buddy film. “Good guy, bad guy,” Hewitt writes. “The guy you love, the guy who makes you quake.” The good guy makes us feel better about really wanting to see the bad guy. The trademark “60 Minutes” piece is a Mike Wallace “gotcha,” involving malfeasance, hidden cameras, and an ambush interview. “Rick, what are you ashamed of?” Wallace asked in a 1994 piece, playing to the camera at a corrupt garage as the mechanics scattered. “Everyone’s scuttling like cockroaches around here!” he added, with satisfaction. In “Minute by Minute . . .” Hewitt wrote that his ratings depend on the “ ‘Madame Defarges’ who bring their knitting to the television set to watch heads fall into the basket. “

To achieve its effects, “60 Minutes” employs forty-four offscreen producers, who do most of the actual reporting. What we see is not news being unearthed—and a correspondent’s spontaneous compassion or skepticism—but a reprise of what the producers already know. A former “60 Minutes” producer, Barry Lando, wrote in Brill’s Content in 1998 that “the taped interviews are often pure shadow play,” with the producers having written out not only the correspondent’s questions but also the expected responses—down to when the sobs will start.

The show opens with a blank screen and a ticking stopwatch. Hewitt often edits with his back to the monitor, just listening. “If we can get the sound right, we can make the pictures work,” he writes in “Tell Me a Story.” A 1998 PBS documentary on Hewitt showed him repeatedly rewriting Mike Wallace’s lead for a piece about Ecuador, taking a leaden, slanted intro and making it soar.

The show is masterly in its use of the human voice. When Wallace, in mahogany tones, inquiredof Jimmy (The Weasel) Fratianno, “You were a good killer?,” the answer could only be grateful: “I just had the talent to do things like that.” When John Ehrlichman suggested that the White House aided the Watergate burglars for compassionate reasons, Wallace’s interjection—”Compassionate!”—said it all. And “60 Minutes” also understands the uses of silence. When Steve Kroft asked Clint Eastwood about the children he’d had out of wedlock, Eastwood’s slow burn—and Kroft’s cocked head and raised eyebrow—made for a classic movie showdown.

Hewitt built “60 Minutes” from the borrowed iconography of the movies, print magazines, and radio. The latter-day news magazines, to their detriment, haven’t replicated that combination. They haven’t created trenchcoat stars like Wallace and Safer, because their biggest names so often stay in the studio. By churning out “news you can use” about fat, finance, and parenting, and Chicken Little traumas—heavy objects that can fall on you at Home Depot, for instance—these shows are closer to the down-market Redbook than to Life.

What the new news magazines rely on is the iconography of television. This means a lot of visual busyness: split screens; sepia dissolves; “cookie cutters” (which throw exciting shadows behind the interviewee, such as a louvered window or a vertical “slash”); and cranes that swoop to capture the correspondent’s standup. A recent story on “20/20”—guy beats cancer three times, marries his nurse—was “teased” using a montage of a photo of the guy as a teen-age football player, which dissolved to a hospital corridor and racing feet, on which was superimposed a syringe and an I.V. drip, which dissolved to three photos of him superimposed on a “Cancer Center” sign and a flashing monitor, and then to the guy now, walking with his wife. This ingenious “layering” took only five seconds. It also made watching the piece moot, because it was the piece, in miniature. As ratings sink even further, the news magazines, worried that their eye candy isn’t emotionally satisfying, try to pluck heartstrings with clichés and hype. A recent “PrimeTime Thursday” report on a baby born to a woman in a coma called the story “emotional and amazing,” “full of astonishments,” “a journey of discovery,” “wonderful,” “truly extraordinary,” “amazing,” “magical,” “remarkable,” and “almost unheard of.”

A form that spins and twists to disguise its own emptiness—this is the definition of decadence. Meanwhile, Don Hewitt is seventy-eight years old and Mike Wallace is just turning eighty-three, yet “60 Minutes” continues its old-fashioned storytelling undiminished. It is a thing of wonder, a coelacanth from ancient days still swimming strongly through the modern world. Long may the stopwatch tick. ♦